Asked about when and exactly how he envisions a Third Temple, Rabbi Richman demurs. That’s a political question he says that depends on when the “when the people are ready” to rebuild. As for the geopolitical fallout, he believes Israel shouldn’t be viewed as the problem in such a scenario, saying, “Do I have to apologize for the fact that Islam squatted on that spot?”
Joshua Mitnick, “Mounting A Challenge To The Status Quo”, The Jewish Week (11 April 2014), 35.
In recent weeks, a group of Religious Zionist rabbis signed a letter urging the government to erect a synagogue on the Temple Mount. One of the signatories was Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of Efrat and former leading New York spiritual leader, who said that even though he believes in a two-state solution and that a unilateral move would spark a war, a peace agreement should include a deal to add a place for Jewish prayer on the complex.
“I don’t think the government has made as much of a statement as it should have made that this is a holy shrine and we should be able to pray there,” he said. “My American experience teaches me that if you don’t use it you lose it. We’ve given the impression that we don’t hold the Temple Mount dear, and we don’t care under whose sovereignty it happens to be.”
Joshua Mitnick, “Mounting A Challenge To The Status Quo”, The Jewish Week (11 April 2014), 35.
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Criticism of the synagogue-as-vendor model is not new. But the most common critiques miss...…many Israelis see the demise of the country as not just possible, but probable. The State of Israel has been established, not its permanence. The most common phrase in Israeli political discourse is some variation of “If X happens (or doesn’t), the state will not survive!” Those who assume that Israel will always exist as a Zionist project should consider how quickly the Soviet, Pahlavi Iranian, apartheid South African, Baathist Iraqi and Yugoslavian states unraveled, and how little warning even sharp-eyed observers had that such transformations were imminent.
In all these cases, presumptions about what was “impossible” helped protect brittle institutions by limiting political imagination. And when objective realities began to diverge dramatically from official common sense, immense pressures accumulated.
Ian S. Lustick, “The Two-State Illusion”, The New York Times (15 September 2013), SR6.
Probably, the ים של שלמה was the greatest intellectual endeavor in Jewish history; meaning: what he tried to do was kind of more courageous than any book in Jewish history. He wanted to review all halakhic literature up to the year 1550 – that’s what he wanted to do. No one’s ever tried to do anything like that, but, sometimes, we say in English, “you bite off more than you can chew.” He bit off more than he could chew and, therefore, מהרש”ל is interesting to study, historically; practically, he’s not really relevant.
Rabbi Adam Mintz, “The Battles Of The Polish Rabbis Regarding The Methods Of Codification”, RabbiMintz.com (31 January 2012) {http://www.rabbimintz.com/audio/the-battles-of-the-polish-rabbis-regarding-the-methods-of-codification/}
Putin’s current tactics for social control are cunning and effective. His popularity rating––a vexed statistic in an authoritarian country––is at eighty per cent. “For less sophisticated people, he relies on brainwashing,” Guriev said. “For more sophisticated but less honest people, he needs to bribe them. For honest, sophisticated people, he uses repression.” The President doesn’t much care if he has pushed an independent mind like Guriev out of the country. He knows that his real cronies––the men from the K.G.B., from his judo club, from Ozero, his dacha co-op near St. Petersburg––have nowhere to go. They will either suffer the Western sanctions, which could cut into their billions, or make the highly dangerous move of plotting against their patron.
David Remnick, “Putin and the Exile”, The New Yorker (28 April 2014), 20.
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The bargain bin was a place of contained chaos. It was often a white...Secular Americans are largely ignorant about religion, but, in surveys, religious Americans turn out to be scarcely more knowledgeable.
“Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion,” Stephen Prothero noted in his book, “Religious Literacy.” “Atheists may be as rare in America as Jesus-loving politicians are in Europe, but here faith is almost entirely devoid of content. One of the most religious countries on earth is also a nation of religious illiterates.”
Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe that the Bible holds the answer to all or most of life’s basic questions. Yet only one-third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and 10 percent think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.
Many Americans know even less about other faiths, from Islam to Hinduism.
Nicholas Kristof, “Religion for $1000, Alex”, The New York Times (27 April 2014), SR11.
Given what we now know about this pervasive sense among secular Jews, it is time to invest more seriously in educational endeavors that reinforce it and build upon it. Simply put, for a Jew to be Jewishly educated today, he or she must know the history of the past 300 years. We must learn and understand our achievements, and explore the background and basis of our success. Was it DNA? Social cues? Pressure from persecution? Education? We need to educate more thoroughly in this area than we have in the past.
Michael Steinhardt, “The 94 Percent”, eJewish Philanthropy (24 June 2014) {http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/the-94-percent}